What most people identify as hunger has three primary components: emotionally driven cravings, conditioned hunger, and physiological hunger.
Emotionally driven cravings
Anyone seeking weigh loss will testify that feeling, sad, angry, bored, lonely, guilty, anxious or depressed, rather that hunger drive over eating. They use food to push these unpleasant feelings down, rather than experiencing them. It is important to identify these feelings, experience them and deal with their source, rather than masking them with food.
Conditioned Hunger
What is usually thought of as physiological hunger sensations is actually composed of two elements, conditioned hunger and purely physiological hunger. Conditioned hunger, rather than physiological hunger, is what causes most of the sensations people identify as real hunger. However, it is easy to demonstrate that these hungry feelings are learned rather than purely physiological.
Hunger sensations are extinguished when you focus on them while in the CAER machine, after which you no longer feel hunger. CAER could only eradicate these sensations if they were learned, rather than being purely physiological. Also, people who go on long fasts report that the sensations of hunger weaken dramatically after about 3 days. Not following hunger sensations with eating also extinguishes them.
Conditioned hunger is what takes will power at the beginning of a diet. CAER takes that away so one simply isn’t hungry. weight loss diabetes
Conditioned hunger results from following hunger sensations with eating. Any behavior that is followed by a reinforcer is more likely to reoccur in the future. That means, following the common social axiom of eating when you feel hungry increases the frequency and intensity of hunger sensations. This forms a vicious circle that trains in stronger and more frequent hunger sensations, stimulating more eating and more hunger, etc.
Research on Conditioned Hunger
Conditioned hunger is supported by classic psychological research by Ivan Pavlov, a Russian psychologist working at the beginning of the 20th century.
Pavlov would ring a bell then give a dog food. After a few trials, the bell produced increased salivation before the food was actually presented. After awhile he found that just presenting the bell, without following it with food, produced increased salivation. Since salivation is a good physiological measure of hunger, Pavlov conditioned hunger in the dog.
Thinking about certain foods will “make your mouth water”, i.e., salivate. The thoughts and images of food are analogous to Pavlov’s bell. Our salivation demonstrations conditioned hunger to those images. CAER extinguishes the hunger response to food images, whether they are real or imagined.
Physiological Hunger
In western countries, where there is an adequate food supply, the experience of physiological hunger is largely unknown to most of the population. It is a much weaker sensation than either emotional craving or conditioned hunger. However, it can be hard to discriminate from the first two. Physiological hunger is often experienced as a sense of weakness or lethargy, rather than the more commonly thought of stomach sensations of hunger.
Physiological hunger at a level most normally fed people experience is usually not very uncomfortable and is easily satiated with a small amount of food. Eating small regularly scheduled meals is the best way to get the nourishment you need.